Why We Keep Getting It Wrong With Russia | Opinion

One of the arguments we hear most often for the West's continued support of Ukraine is that this is a very inexpensive way to damage Russia. Why not just let the poor, hapless Ukrainians do the dying for us? Besides the abject cynicism of this logic, it begs a fundamental question. Why do we want to damage Russia? Russia is not the Soviet Union: geographically, ideologically, economically, or militarily.

Wake up America.

The disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991 involved two distinct events. First, the Soviet Union had inherited and preserved the old Czarist Empire. This was the last of the 19th century, European colonial empires. It survived longer than the British, French, or Spanish empires in part because it was a contiguous landmass with internal, rather than seaborne, lines of communications, and in part because of the ideological commitment and resulting ruthlessness of the Communist Party. When central authority weakened, non-Russian people in places like Kazakstan, Uzbekistan, and Armenia sought sovereignty. Russia lost 25 percent of its territory and 50 percent of its population.

The second major event was Boris Yeltsin's attempt to unravel the Marxist past.

The Soviet Union had been established by Bolshevik revolutionaries in 1922. It was dedicated to the principles of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin which it aggressively sought to spread across the globe. These principles included the abolition of most private property, the abolition of all religions and the abolition of every political institution not controlled by the Communist Party. These principles were enforced with an extreme brutality that was justified, as is so often the case, by the claim that today's state-sponsored suffering would produce a brighter future tomorrow.

The Soviet Union became one of the most absolute dictatorships the world has ever known. All political power was concentrated in the hands of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). Party members controlled the government in Moscow and all the Soviet Union's 15 republics. Party committees monitored and controlled all industrial, social, political, educational, and scientific institutions. Anyone hoping to advance to a senior position in any career had to be a Party member.

In 1991, this totalitarian system, based on terror and central planning, collapsed. Control of public institutions by the Communist Party ended. Russia now has an elected parliament in which Vladimir Putin's United Russia party controls 325 out of 450 seats. The remaining 125 seats are divided among four main opposition parties. As America's foremost Soviet scholar George Kennan pointed out in 1998, "Our differences in the cold war were with the Soviet Communist regime. And now we are turning our backs on the very people who mounted the greatest bloodless revolution in history to remove that Soviet regime."

The Soviet government closed thousands of churches and seized hundreds of monasteries. Tens of thousands of priests, monks and nuns were executed, many quite savagely.

The post-Soviet Russian government removed most restrictions on religious activity. Churches synagogues and mosques were returned to their congregations. Monasteries and seminaries. were reopened. According to a poll by the independent Levada Center, 71 percent of Russians now identify as Orthodox Christians, while 5 percent identify as Muslims.

The Soviet Union had a centrally planned economy where the means of production were owned by the state. The government seized private property without compensation, set prices, owned all banks, and controlled the labor market. Grain had to be imported and the currency was not freely convertible. Unemployment was a crime. Those without an assigned job were sent to labor camps. Peasants who had been promised land by the revolution found themselves still serfs, but now on Soviet collective farms.

In post-Soviet Russia, most of the economy is in private hands. The ruble is convertible, grain is exported instead of imported and trade with the outside world has increased significantly. State- owned property was sold to the public on a massive scale. The process was inefficient and often corrupt, but central planning by the state came to an end. In post-Soviet Russia, supply and demand determine prices, banks have been privatized, and the labor is allocated on market principles. According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), government expenditures in Russia now account for the same percentage of GDP as they do in the United States.

When Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985, Soviet per capita GDP was a bit more than one quarter that of the U.S. Only senior members of the Communist Party enjoyed anything like a Western standard of living. Most Russians lived in or near poverty. Today, the IMF estimates Russian per capita GDP to be $35,300. Russia is now a middle-income country and this economic success accounts for much of Putin's popularity.

The Soviet Union was one of the most highly militarized states in history and along with its Warsaw Pact allies a genuine threat to Western Europe. In 1991, Moscow had 3.7 million active duty military personnel and spent 17 percent of GDP on defense. Before the war in Ukraine began, the Russian Federation had a military less than one third of that size. In 2022, Russia's military budget was $81.7, as compared to $858 for the United States. Apart from Syria, Russia has no overseas military bases other than legacy facilities in former Soviet Republics. Meanwhile, the United States maintains more than 900 military bases scattered across the globe. The Warsaw Pact disbanded in 1991 and many of its former members have since joined NATO.

More than a year ago we wrote in these pages that for many reasons Ukraine had as much chance of defeating Russia as Mexico did of defeating the United States. Ridiculed at the time, our prediction has proven all too accurate. We also wrote that American taxpayers would eventually grow tired of paying for the pensions of retired Ukrainian civil servants. And now they have.

The West backed the losing side in an unnecessary war that has cost thousands of Russian and Ukrainian lives. The question now is what sort of post-war relations the United States and its allies can hope to have with the post-Soviet Russian Federation. The Kremlin has described the current state of relations as "below zero". Considering that Russia maintains the world's largest nuclear weapons arsenal, that is not a good place to be.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is a pragmatic nationalist, not a Marxist ideologue. In a recent tribute to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Putin wrote, "The name of Henry Kissinger is inextricably linked with a pragmatic foreign policy line, which at one time made it possible to achieve detente in international tensions and reach the most important Soviet-American agreements that contributed to the strengthening of global security." That statement was a very clear invitation to improve relations between Russia and the West. Russia is not the Soviet Union and doing so would be in our own self-interest.

David H. Rundell is the author of Vision or Mirage, Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads and a former chief of mission at the American Embassy in Saudi Arabia. Ambassador Michael Gfoeller is a former political advisor to the U.S. Central Command who spent 15 years working the Soviet Union and former Soviet Union.

The views expressed in this article are the writers' own.